QuoteReplyTopic: Make Australia Great Again Posted: 11 Jan 2017 at 6:02pm

1. Slash Corporate Tax.The centrepiece of the Coalition’s re-election pitch was the ‘enterprise tax plan’ which will see Australia’s corporate tax rate taper down from 30 per cent to 25 by 2025. Yet even that will sit well above Asia’s average rate of 22 per cent, much less Canada’s take of just 15 per cent. Trump plans to turn around America’s economic torpor by dropping its rate from 39 per cent to a neat 15. If you have cancer, you don’t wait a decade before starting chemo. Forget the 10 year plan and slash tax now.

2. Drain Lake Burley Griffin. Beneath the labyrinth of state and federal bureaucracies lies a subspecies of publicly funded organisations, often styled as charities or public interest groups, that drink from Canberra’s rivers of gold to peddle partisan political agendas. The Grattan institute took its more than $30 million Treasury stipend to campaign without irony for higher taxes and bigger government. The Human Rights Commission uses it’s $30 million to champion a doctrinaire left view of human rights hostile to individualism and core tenets of our intellectual tradition. Friends of the Earth and the Australian Conservation Foundation use our money to campaign against economic development and interfere with property rights. If such groups do indeed enjoy the support they profess they do, they should stand on their own two feet.3. Freeze public service hiring. There are currently around 243,300 Commonwealth public servants, up from 212,784 in 2001 and 143,193 in 1996. Are we getting value for money? With the Coalition’s much-vaunted promise of a budget surplus now sounding less convincing than an overeager Amway salesman, following Trump’s lead and freezing hiring across the public service is a no brainer.4. Public service pay freeze. Research from the IPA’s Aaron Lane has found the average public servant brings home nearly $8,000 more than their private sector peers. Add to this perks like overgenerous leave entitlements and beefed up super contributions and there’s no doubt our frank and fearless public service are living large on the public dime. What’s good for the goose is good for the gander. Freeze public service pay until the private sector catches up. Then index annual pay rises to no higher than inflation.5. Means test Medicare. Anyone who has recently visited the emergency room of a public hospital can tell you that universal ‘free’ healthcare isn’t the panacea it’s held up to be. With costs ballooning and set to rise steeply into the future, hard choices are inevitable. If providing care for those who most need it is the measure of our health system’s success, there’s no reason why middle-income and wealthy Australians should rely on other taxpayers to meet their healthcare needs. Means test Medicare so that low-income and vulnerable Australians are the beneficiaries.6. Bring back the debt ceiling. Bring back the debt ceiling so that members of Parliament are held to account for mortgaging our nation’s future.7. ‘One in, two out’. Although the government’s Red Tape Reduction agenda has been a modest success, it’s time we double down. Turnbull should follow Trump’s ‘one in, two out’ approach to new regulations so Canberra’s bloodlust for red tape is kept tightly in check8. Abandon Recognition. What began as a well-intentioned effort to recognise the place of Indigenous Australians in our nation’s founding document has become a sounding board for historical grievance. The Government should cut its losses and focus on real outcomes, not symbolism.9. Repeal 18C. By making subjective offence a standard for legal sanction, 18C enshrines victim status for state designated minorities. It embodies everything wrong with the disease of identity politics and has no place in a liberal democracy reliant upon the free flow of ideas.10. Abolish the RET. Funnelling billions of taxpayer dollars into renewable energy boondoggles half as reliable and over twice as expensive as conventional energy has proven a costly hobbyhorse we can do without. If you read beyond the prophecies of the doomsayers you’ll find most experts agree renewable energy will be cheaper than fossil fuel in a generation or two’s time. But before then, let’s not waste a hundred billion dollars satisfying the whims of environmental fantasists.John Slater7 January 2017 9:00 am

My vote would be to cut hand outs and pensions and rorts by politicians.

They keep telling us we have to tighten our belts , and cut welfare and pensions, so lets have them lead from the front line, and do just what they are saying, and get their snouts out of the trough, and when they are out, stand in line at centrelink like the rest of the unemployed do.

The amount of money they are ripping off , for their own happy times, is incredible .

That sheila who bought the apartment on the Gold Coast as an "after thought " should be locked up. When young folks are struggling to buy a home and she boasts about this ! Just happened to have a spare $750 thous laying about. And in her press appearance she showed no guilt at all. Just passed it off as a bit of a mix up , but she,ll be right mate. If she gets booted,which she should, please tell me she isnt going to get any benefits, and in fact she will be paying some money back ?

My vote would be to cut hand outs and pensions and rorts by politicians.

They keep telling us we have to tighten our belts , and cut welfare and pensions, so lets have them lead from the front line, and do just what they are saying, and get their snouts out of the trough, and when they are out, stand in line at centrelink like the rest of the unemployed do.

The amount of money they are ripping off , for their own happy times, is incredible .

That sheila who bought the apartment on the Gold Coast as an "after thought " should be locked up. When young folks are struggling to buy a home and she boasts about this ! Just happened to have a spare $750 thous laying about. And in her press appearance she showed no guilt at all. Just passed it off as a bit of a mix up , but she,ll be right mate. If she gets booted,which she should, please tell me she isnt going to get any benefits, and in fact she will be paying some money back ?

had to read that three times before I worked out the pension cuts were pollies'...

My vote would be to cut hand outs and pensions and rorts by politicians.

They keep telling us we have to tighten our belts , and cut welfare and pensions, so lets have them lead from the front line, and do just what they are saying, and get their snouts out of the trough, and when they are out, stand in line at centrelink like the rest of the unemployed do.

The amount of money they are ripping off , for their own happy times, is incredible .

That sheila who bought the apartment on the Gold Coast as an "after thought " should be locked up. When young folks are struggling to buy a home and she boasts about this ! Just happened to have a spare $750 thous laying about. And in her press appearance she showed no guilt at all. Just passed it off as a bit of a mix up , but she,ll be right mate. If she gets booted,which she should, please tell me she isnt going to get any benefits, and in fact she will be paying some money back ?

had to read that three times before I worked out the pension cuts were pollies'...

Me too!

aa, lots of people buy investment properties, and there is absolutely nothing wrong with that. The issue is that she appears to have been very "lucky" in that almost every time she had official business on the Gold Coast, she coincidentally was either looking at or buying property ... that does not pass the "pub test" ... now, whether she has actually done anything wrong, and it appears that she has claimed about $500 worth of cabs and com cars that she is paying back, is debatable, and is it a hanging offence? The problem is, they all do it to some degree, and they can't be trusted, so the simple answer is an independent body to approve everything they spend. Some elected officials MUST travel a lot (Trade Minister, Foreign Affairs, Sports) some officials rarely need to travel outside their electorate.

The system is too easy to diddle, change it! ... and neither side has really ever tried, they might now.

In reference to every post in the Trump thread ... "There may have been a tiny bit of license taken there" ... Ok, Thanks for the "heads up" PT!

Get in line like the rest of us if you want any benefits , or live off your super, which should be massive .

Yes! ... I think you will actually find that a lot of the outrageous pension benefits have been cut back ... Bronnie keeps getting thrown up as the example, getting $250k a year, 10 free flights, etc, etc, but she would be about the last on that old arrangement, being she'd been there nearly 30 years! Their Super arrangements are very generous too, but keep in mind, the nature of the job is, you may be sacked after 4 years and be unemployed, and done nothing wrong, just been unlucky! Some of the biggest rorts though, are the Senior Public Servants packages ... and they are generally leeching, unproductive, stuff ups, who could never get a job in the private sector.

In reference to every post in the Trump thread ... "There may have been a tiny bit of license taken there" ... Ok, Thanks for the "heads up" PT!

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